Data sharing in the cloud puts education sector at risk of data breaches

Netwrix survey reveals that employees at 54% of educational organizations use cloud applications to share sensitive data outside of IT control and knowledge.

Netwrix, a cybersecurity vendor that makes data security easy, today announced additional findings from its 2020 Data Risk & Security Report. The report reveals that many educational organizations are at risk of data security incidents during the current period of working from home and virtual learning.

According to the survey, even before the lockdown, the majority of educational organizations had weak data security controls. In particular, 54% of IT professionals in the educational sector confessed that employees put data at risk by sharing it via cloud apps outside of IT knowledge. This is the highest percentage among all verticals surveyed. The move to distance learning increases this risk even more.

Other notable findings of the report include:

82% of educational organizations don’t track data sharing at all or do it manually, and 50% of them suffered a data breach due to unauthorized data sharing last year.

28% of respondents discovered data outside of secure locations, which is the highest number of all industries surveyed. This data was left exposed for days (40%) or months (33%).

Only 8% of respondents have developed cybersecurity and risk KPIs to evaluate their security posture and track success.

Distance learning creates many challenges for educational organizations, and cybersecurity is often taking a back seat to operational resilience. The Netwrix survey shows that security processes were not ideal before the pandemic, leaving these institutions even more vulnerable to the growing number of cyber threats today. To ensure these institutions can secure their student and employee data, IT professionals need to get back to basics. First, they need to understand what sensitive data they have, and classify it by its level of sensitivity and value to the organization. Second, they need to ensure that the data is stored securely, prioritizing the most important data. And last, they need to adopt healthy security practices for granting permissions in order to avoid data overexposure.Steve Dickson, CEO at Netwrix.

Netwrix makes data security easy thereby simplifying how professionals can control sensitive, regulated and business-critical data, regardless of where it resides. More than 10,000 organizations worldwide rely on Netwrix solutions to secure sensitive data, realize the full business value of enterprise content, pass compliance audits with less effort and expense, and increase the productivityof IT teams and knowledge workers.

Founded in 2006, Netwrix has earned more than 150 industry awards and been named to both the Inc. 5000 and Deloitte Technology Fast 500 lists of the fastest growing companies in the U.S.